Annotated Bibliography Part Three

Andrew Glass 3/30/09
Prof. Pemberton LIB. 103
Annotated Bibliography (Part 3)

N/A. “Scholarly Communication Crisis.” Library Mosaics. 14.6 (2003): 23-23.

Despite the notable lack of author in this article, it can be used as a reliable and pithy introduction to the concept of scholarly communication and its current crisis. Perhaps intended for faculty room reading during a lunch break, this one page article dives right into how the scholarly communication cycle begins and how it ends; that is it starts when a faculty member does research and needs to have it published and ends when the university has to pay the publisher for the research its own faculty member wrote about. From here the article goes into the fact that the publishing costs have “skyrocketed” over the past fifteen years, and increasingly libraries are finding that they simply do not have the funding to spend on the subscription. Next is mentioned the various ways libraries are trying to manage this problem; from relying more on online databases to simply subscribing to fewer journals. One of the more interesting features of this article has to do with the suggestions it lays out for dealing with this epidemic. The article suggests that faculty members try to protect their copyrights to their work. Or more specifically that they should bargain with the publisher to allow them to at least distribute their findings to their students and their library. It closes with the sentiment that this problem is going to take a lot of time and effort on the part of many individuals working together to fix it.

Yiotis, Kristen. “The Open Access Initiative: A New Paradigm for Scholarly Communications.” Information Technologies & Libraries. 24. 4 (2005): 157-162.

Kristen Yiotis, a graduate of San Jose State University and their library technologies program writes an article on a subject that she is well acquainted with: the scholarly communication crisis. While at its heart her article is about the crisis surrounding scholarly communication, it makes the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the “whys”/ “how’s” and jumps right into a suggested solution for the problem. In her article she discusses what is known as the “Open Access Initiative” (or OA for short), its origin, the basic mechanics that lay behind it, and how this initiative offers a second option for scholars who want to be published (but do not want to go to a publisher). While this article is written in plain English, one really should have a background in the subject that she discusses in order to get the most out of her article. While at times it can drift to personal opinion, Yiotis remains grounded in solid fact and her article can be used in furthering the discussion on scholarly communication fairly easily.

Milne, Patricia. “Scholarly communication: crisis, response and future: a review of the literature.”Austrilian Acidemic & Research Libraries.30.2 (1999): 70-88.

Patricia Milne, a long-time libraian and writer for Austrilian Acidemic & Research Libraries first sets out in her article to do what many other authers in this field attempt to to: simply define what the scholarly communication crisis is and how it came about. In truth there is only so much
one may say about the means by which this present dilemma came to be; it’s the same the world round be it here in the US or over in Australia. However the interesting feature that stands out in her article is that she examines not the common three pronged explination to this problem (that being scholar, publisher, impoverished library), but rather she looks at, in addition to these concepts, what she calls the “learned societies themselves”. Milne also strives to examine how the digital age in which we live exasperates the situation by making unclear the “once-clear distinctions and relationships between them [“them” being the aforementioned elements of the crisis”]”. On the whole her work is intended for intorductory audiences to this subject.

Albert, Daniel M. MD, Liesegang, Thomas J. MD, and Andrew P. Schachat MD. “The Open Access initiative in scientific and biomedical publishing: Fourth in the series on editorship.” American Journal of Ophthalmology. 139. 1 (2005): 156-167.

The three authors of this article Albery, Liesegang, and Schachat are Editors in Chiefs of Archives of Ophthalmology in Madison Wisconsin, American Journal of Ophthalmology in Jacksonville Florida, and Ophthalmology in Baltimore Maryland (respectivly). They provide another intorductory, yet highly authoritative, look into the Open Access Initiative (OA); a hopefull soultion for the communication crisis. In their article they set out to outline the basic concepts of OA, it’s history, and “the value of the traditional print model”. They argue that it will be a financial impossibility to maintain both the traditional print model of publishing an dthe newer digital method. In either case they maintaine that pains must be taken so that knowledge is not lost, and that it can be disseminated as needed. While this is an introductory work it is still important that the audience has some prior understanding of the subject.